


The Long Way Round

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2017 [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Community: wishlist_fic, Cousin Relationship, Exposition Olympics, Fluff, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Post-Canon, Post-Season 3A, Prompt Fic, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 04:46:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12951582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: After the nemeton, the Sheriff sends Stiles to stay with his cousin for a while. One Willow Rosenberg.





	The Long Way Round

**Author's Note:**

> For allonym, who asked for what the summary says. And let me tell you, I _hate_ you for that prompt. You made me write Willow. I don't like Willow. I don't enjoy her. I don't write her. But you said I had to and I did and Buffy crept in and I'd say I'm sorry but you made me write Willow (and it was good for me, because sometimes I need to move outside my comfort zone, but don't tell anyone I said that), so I'm not. 
> 
> Ahem. I hope you like it and that I didn't screw it up too badly.

+

End

+

Stiles doesn’t get a say in it. 

He gets home on Friday, two weeks after he died to save his father’s life, to find his bags packed and his dad out of uniform for once, a spanking new passport in hand. In Stiles’ name.

“What’s this?” Stiles asks, a sinking feeling in his gut. Well, a more sinking feeling than usual. He’s been sleeping for shit since the whole nemeton drowning thing, seeing shadows around every corner. 

Hypervigilance. 

“You’re killing yourself,” his dad says, no preamble, no Stilinski-patented talking-around-it. Just a cold, hard fact that Stiles has known for a while but not said out loud because what would it change?

Scott still needs him (ha!) and people are still dying and he can’t just – 

“I talked to your cousin Willow.”

Wait. What?

“The one who moved to England a few years ago?” Stiles squints at his dad because the man’s never really kept up with Stiles’ mom’s side of the family, and suddenly he’s talking to some estranged cousin a decade older than Stiles? Presumably _about_ Stiles?

“That one. You’re going to stay with her for a while.”

“What?! No!”

“Yes, Stiles. You’re not eighteen yet, and that means I can still make that choice for you. If you want to, I can’t stop you if you’re back here on your eighteenth. But until then, you’re my son. My responsibility. And I know I’ve been doing a shit job of that-“

Stiles opens his mouth to protest because his dad has duties, Stiles knows that, he doesn’t blame – 

“I have, kid, shut up. But I know now, what’s going on and I can’t… I won’t let you kill yourself over… monsters and witches and werewolves. I can’t. You’re all I got left, kid, and I need to know you’re safe. So you’re staying with Willow, at least until you turn eighteen. You still want to come back then, I can’t stop you. But I hope, damn, I _pray_ , that you won’t. Not until this madness has calmed down, at least.”

Stiles snorts humorlessly because he’s been waiting for that since a body in the woods and red eyes in the dark and it’s only gotten worse. He’s been to so many funerals this past year, so many more unmarked graves in the woods. 

And he can’t lie and say that he’s never considered running away. Just getting the fuck away from all this insanity before it eats him whole. He stayed for his dad, and for Scott. 

But Scott has barely said so much as hello over the past few weeks, busy with Allison _again_ and Isaac and everything and his dad… well. 

“Only until I’m eighteen,” he says and it sounds like a lie even to his own ears. 

He just doesn’t know what the lie is.

+

Middle

+

To be honest, he barely remembers Willow. Red hair and shy smiles, always an ear for his mad tales when he was younger, always willing to play with him when they visited, or help him research some inane subject. Kind. Friendly. 

A cardboard cut-out of a distant relative, seen through childhood goggles. 

Maybe it’s everything he’s seen, or maybe it’s just not being ten anymore, but the woman who picks him up at the airport is nothing like the Willow he remembers.

Oh, she still has the red hair and her smile is still sweet, but her eyes have something tired and hardened in them. Her hands are scarred, tiny, silvery nicks all over, and her back is straight. She doesn’t try to hide herself anymore, to make herself smaller. Her sweater is bright red and her jeans are tight, instead of the fuzzy, pastel-y clothes he remembers her wearing, always blending into the background. This version of his cousin isn’t blending. Instead she stands out, even in the crowded Heathrow terminal. 

And when Stiles tries to awkwardly give her his hand to shake, she reels him in and hugs him tightly. Tighter than most people would. Fiercely, maybe. It’s a Stilinski hug, even though she’s a Rosenberg and Stilinski hugs were never this fierce before grief moved into their house instead of Claudia. 

“So,” she jokes once she releases him, “what made you decide to come live with your old maiden cousin?”

“What? No husband and three kids? I’m disappointed!”

She chuckles and helps him juggle his bag with a fond look. “Nah. I broke up with my girlfriend a few months ago. I’m rocking the single thing. What about you?”

Uhm. He blushes. Scarlet. 

Willow laughs, lets him have it and leads him toward a cutesy little car that’s almost as quirky as his jeep. He misses Roscoe, made his dad promise to drive him once a week, so he doesn’t rust up completely.

They load up his bags and get in. As they pull into traffic, which is frankly _insane_ and also _the wrong way around, what the hell, British people_ , Willow tucks a stray strand of hair behind one ear and says, “I hope you don’t mind, but we’re making a little detour to pick my roommate up from work.”

Stiles frowns, both because he doubts anything in this traffic is a _little detour_ and also because it’s barely noon here, and there’s something in her voice – 

“Okay?”

She nods. “Good. Great. Because you, me and Buffy, we need to have a conversation.”

+

“So,” Willow says a few hours later, after an eternity crawling through London traffic and then a surprisingly pretty journey into the green belt surrounding the City of Traffic Hell. Her roommate, a cute blonde with heels that would make Lydia weep with envy and cold eyes, is hanging around in the background like a particularly adorable bodyguard. 

Willow fidgets with the tea she made for them, even though Buffy made no move to drink hers and Stiles doesn’t really like tea. She turns her oversized mug over and over in her hands, takes a sip, grimaces at the heat and then blurts,“There is no nice way to say this, so I’ll just say it.”

“She’s really your girlfriend and you’re both screamers?” He says it mostly to wipe the anxious look off of his favorite cousin’s face. And because he has no filter. Okay, actually it’s mostly the lack of filter. 

“What? Ew, no! Buffy’s ninety percent straight, except when Faith’s around and we’re just friends and that would be like kissing your sister and – ew. Stiles! No. I was going to say that the supernatural is real and I’m a witch and Buffy’s like Wonder Woman only with more vampires and if you’re going to be staying with us, you need to know, because hiding things has only ever made people easier to kidnap and yeah. Surprise! Vampires, werewolves, witches, demons. It’s all real. Ta-da!”

Willow gives a nervous giggle and makes actual jazz hands at Stiles while, in the background, Buffy face palms. Stiles stares at both women long and hard, trying to find the joke in this and when he finds nothing, he throws his head back and laughs. And laughs and laughs and laughs and there might be tears because of course. Of fucking course, this is how life always goes for him, out of the frying pan and into the fire and it never, ever goes to plan, not _ever_. 

Since half a body in the woods, nothing has gone right. Why would his grand escape from certain death be any better?

“I don’t think he believes us, Wills,” Buffy mutters, somewhere at the edge of his perception and he fights to get himself under control long enough to gasp, “No, no, I believe you. It’s fine, I believe you.”

He takes a deep breath, and something beyond gallows humor finally registers. “Hold on, did you say you’re a witch? That doesn’t, by chance, have anything to do with belief and some kind of spark, does it?”

“What?” Willow frowns and he doesn’t remember her ever getting this intense before. “Where did you hear that?”

He flaps a hand. “While we were trying to figure out who the kanima was, Deaton, that’s my best friend’s boss, gave me a bag of mountain ash and told me if I believed enough, I’d manage to use it to trap all the werewolves inside the rave with the kanima and that sounds like someone’s playing Clue, Jackson with the venom in the warehouse, but people were dying and he mentioned a spark thing and it actually worked, so I think I did something, but Deaton’s a cryptic fucker at the best of times and he wouldn’t tell me what, afterwards. And then there was the whole thing where mama Argent killed herself because Derek bit her in self-defense and there was no time for, like research because everyone was all murder and stabby and bitey and Scott fucked up and Jackson died and came back to life and then a pack of alphas and a crazy darach bitch came to town and started murdering _everyone_ and I got sacrificed to a freaking dead tree and now I have really, really bad nightmares. Like, worse than usual, it’s seriously freaking me out. Uhm… what were we talking about?”

He pauses, considers all the secrets that just spilled out of his mouth, and cringes. Maybe he should have talked about all this with someone before he reached boiling point and it just exploded out of him in front of a cousin he barely knows. Huh.

Also, therapy, probably.

So much therapy. 

Because Ms. Morell’s ‘keep going’ didn’t really do anything except end with him dead in a tub of ice water, so, yeah. 

“I think he already knew, Wills,” Buffy corrects in the same tone of voice she used before, a wry little smirk on her face and Stiles knows that look. Derek gets it, sometimes, when everything is pretty shitty, but Stiles cracks an excellent joke anyway. It’s three parts gallows humor, four parts fatalistic resignation to certain doom and three parts ‘I have no idea what the fuck is going on, but I’ll smile and wave anyway and hope no-one dies’.

Willow frowns harder. “Your dad didn’t send you here because of pretty crime and drug experimentation, did he?”

So that was the story. Stiles had wondered. 

Stiles shakes his head. “No. He sent me here because he was afraid I’d get killed by the monsters otherwise.”

“Werewolves,” Willow summarizes.

Stiles shakes his head harder. “Actually, the ‘wolves are mostly the good guys. Dicks, but good dicks, you know. No. I meant the freaking Argents.” Because even Deucalion at his most Demon Wolf-y had nothing on a freaking geriatric systematically beating Stiles within an inch of his life, just for kicks. As a message. Because it was _fun_. “Gerard’s a bigger monster than even Jackson in full fucking scales ever was! He-“

“Argent?” Buffy interrupts, sharply. “Gerard Argent?”

“You know him?”

She holds up a finger, pulls out a phone and starts dialing. “Giles? Yeah, it’s me. Listen, I need a way to contact the Argent Matriarch, ASAP. Willow’s cousin apparently had a run-in with Gerard Argent and I could swear we were told the old man was out of the game. Either Evelyn lied to us, or they can’t keep their own psychos in check. Either was, I need to yell at her. Yes, I know-“ Her voice trails off as she leaves the room.

Stiles turns an expectant gaze on his cousin, who shifts uncomfortably. “Buffy’s a vampire slayer,” she says, by way of explanation. “Actually, she’s _the_ vampire slayer. Oldest on record. And she’s the head of the new Council of Watchers, and we have a treaty with all seven of the old hunting families. The Argent one specifically includes moderation and a clause about Gerard, because he once tried to kill a friend of ours really, really hard, and we don’t take kindly to hunters killing innocent werewolves. So. Yeah.” 

Stiels tries to parse any of that, gets hung up on ‘vampire slayer’ like it’s some sort of title, on ‘treaty’ and ‘seven families’ and doesn’t even make it to ‘innocent werewolves’ before he decides to just… give up. Leave it for later. Too much. Shy Willow, his wallflower cousin, is a witch whose best friend has the Argents on a short leash and somehow, it sounds like they’re going to do something? About… everything?

Two weeks ago, Stiles was clinically dead for nine hours. His Bizarre Scale is blown out completely. 

“Huh,” he says. “I’ll freak out about all that at some point, but, huh. Okay.”

She snorts, amused, leans forward, “Okay. Good. We have chocolate, Bollywood movies and blankets to help with that, whenever you feel like it. Buffy will be back in a while with news. Until then, tell me exactly what this Deaton guy said about a spark.”

+

Beginning

+

“Are you sure we’ll make it in time?” Stiles demands. He’s gnawing on the side of his thumb and frantically flipping through his journal with his free hand, trying to cram a few more last minute spells into his head, just in case.

“We’ll be fine,” Willow tells him, for about the fifth time. “Now calm down, you’re sparking.”

Stiles pauses. Looks around. Realizes that he managed to short out the screen of the guy sitting in front of him and from the way the chick across the aisle is slapping her ipod, that’s gone, too. Whoops. 

He closes his eyes, reels in all the nervous energy he couldn’t quite contain before. Deep breath. Be the spark, not a raging forest fire. Deep breath. He keeps it up, until he feels his cousin’s hand on his, drawing his mangled thumb from his mouth. 

He blinks his eyes open and feels a lot calmer. If the plane’s flight smooths out at roughly the same time, well, coincidence.

“Thank god,” Buffy mutters from behind them, sticking her head between seats. “I’ve been flung through unstable portals into hell dimensions and it was less barf-inducing than this flight.”

He slaps at her face, earning himself an over-seat noogie, and laughs. 

“We’ll make it,” Willow reassures him. “I talked to your friend’s mom just before we took off, and she says your dad is stable and expected to make a full recovery.”

“And Chris promised to call if those Dead Doc things make another move. I’ve got his balls in a vice, he’ll do as he says.” Buffy’s grin is vicious and Stiles doesn’t need to see it to know. The slayer’s scary when you piss her off and nothing pisses her off like her people being in danger. 

“You’re Wills’, so that means you’re mine. Deal with it,” she told him, earlier, when he asked why she was coming with them in the first place. Willow could nuke good old BH on her own, and Stiles isn’t a slouch either, anymore, in the magic department. Buffy’s kickass, but not really necessary. Still, she’s here. 

Casually, she leans between their seats again and adds, “Dawnie and Faith were checking in on things down in LA, so they’re driving up, too. Xander gives his apologies, but with the new baby he can’t really leave at the drop of a hat. Oz is flying out later today, he’ll get there by morning. Giles has the geek squad on research back home.”

She tugs on a piece of Stiles’ ever-growing hair. “We’ll clean Beacon Hills up, once and for all, and then you can go home, safe in the knowledge that it’s not monster central anymore and also, that you can kick ass.” She pauses. “I’ll miss our midnight ice-cream talks, though.”

Buffy’s sleeping patterns are as erratic as Stiles. They’re late-night zombie buddies. Willow just buys a lot of ice-cream and rolls her eyes at them. 

“I’ll call you whenever there’s something to kill and you can come visit,” he consoles, getting a bright grin from the slayer. 

“This is why you’re my favorite Rosenberg. You know that the way to a girl’s heart is through her murderous impulses.”

“Hey!” Willow complains and as the women start squabbling, Stiles takes another deep breath. 

Technically, he’s breaking his dad’s rule about not coming home until he’s eighteen. But dad’s hurt and Beacon Hills is overrun and Scott is being useless, as usual. And Stiles… Stiles has magic now, and a support system in his cousin and her madcap family. Once of which has the Argents by the short and curlies, which amuses Stiles greatly. 

He’s not weak anymore, or defenseless. More than 147 pounds of meat and sarcasm. 

He’s going to fix this. 

All of it. 

With help. And with magic. Magic is awesome. 

“Exactly,” Willow agrees and he might have said that out loud. 

He nods. 

He didn’t get a say in how he left, but he’s damn well going to decide how he returns and the answer to that is easy: not alone, and not afraid. 

They’ll kick ass. 

And once that’s done, he’ll buy popcorn, introduce Oz to Derek and sit back to enjoy the show because he knows, down to his bones, that it’ll be hilarious. If he can get Buffy to join, maybe she won’t bond with Lydia over shoes and they won’t take over the world on a whim, so that’s a plus, too. 

And oh, “What do you think is going to happen if we let Faith loose on good ole Scotty?...”

+


End file.
